Ultima Ascension

THE BAD:
Moonglow! Your character's voice, the dialogue, boarding the ship.

SUMMARY:
First of all let me correct a common mistake. This game does not need a monster PC to play! Wen I first played it all I had was a 166 with 32Mb of EDO Ram, and a VooDoo1 4Mb graphics card and it ran fine, except when I got to Moonglow (Which is why it is in the bad list), even though I have since upgraded it still crawls there. Just remember to turn Mip-Mapping of, and all the options down and you will get good performance on slower machines.

Why is boarding the ship in the bad? Well, if you are in the water with heavy armour on, you sink. If you have just surfaced after a dive and click on this ship to board, but have just gone under the surface. When you are in the overhead view you still lose air from your lungs. You have to stop controlling the ship to get it to register you are out of the water.

Now onto the actual review...

This is not an easy game, but only because of the monsters, for example in the first location there are thieves walking around at night and if you are not a high-health class they can kill you in one (But they fall easilly to a long-bow which you can steal from the boyer). But if you are talking about ease of puzzles then this is easy. There is only one puzzle I have never solved, and it's an optional one so that's alright. (If you want to know which puzzle that is look at this game's forum, the string (only one in there at the time of writing, but there may be some more in the future... Yeah Right!) is called "Bone Gauntlets and Hythloth closed area"

This game can get confusing at first, as you can go anywhere you want at any time, the only things baring your way are mountains (which are scalable if you dare) inhabited by monsters which can shoot a tracking fire ball at you, a path which is inhabited by monsters that can root you to the spot, unable to do anything while they eat you, and the ocean which will drown you if you try to swim it.

Another annoying thing is, if you don't talk to this certain character in the first town, you won't know how to bind spells to your book (If you need to know, when you exit the castle, cross the bridge and turn right, talk to the mage).

Also, on slower machines lifts can cause some problems. To the north of Paws is a mage's tower with a very tall lift. Several times I've had trouble getting down from there (You need to get up there if you want the levitate scroll early) because, for no reason at all, the lift started going up while on the way down. To get out of the tower I had to wait until it got far enough down to allow me to jump of. I only just survived the fall...

This game is definetly not full of action, it takes time, and features some very hard bosses with the exception of Talornia. When fighting Talornia, don't move after she talks to you. Just stand there and pepper her with arrows. She won't even move, she may take of at one point but she'll just hover there.

If you have a lot of time on your hands, and can stand a few crashes (Unless you haven't put the patch on, then you'll be lucky to load it up without it crashing, luckily, if you have the english version it comes already patched). This game will be some fun. A large hard-drive also helps, the last time I went through this I had about 2Gb of save games, they are not small.